Guides
Excel rota templates
Most rotas are born in a spreadsheet, and a well-built Excel template genuinely works for a small, stable team. The problems don’t come from the template — they come from change: mid-week edits, growing headcount, and the moment the rota has to reach twenty phones.
What a good Excel rota template needs
- Days as columns, staff as rows — one week per sheet, one cell per shift.
- A totals column per person, so weekly hours are visible while you edit.
- Consistent shift notation (9-17, not a mix of “9am–5pm” and “09:00”).
- A visible “last updated” stamp, because versions will drift.
If your team is small and the week rarely changes after publishing, this is a perfectly sound setup.
Where spreadsheets break
- No working-time checks — nothing warns you about a close-then-open pair with too little rest, a missing break, or a weekly-hours risk.
- Version drift — the file gets copied for each week, edited in two places, and screenshotted into chats; nobody is sure which rota is current.
- Distribution — a spreadsheet doesn’t reach phones well, and every mid-week change means re-sending and re-explaining.
- Silent edits — anyone with the file can change it and nobody is notified.
None of these failures show up as a line on an invoice — they show up as your hours. The ROI calculator puts a number on them.
Keep the speed, drop the copying
Darouta’s editor is deliberately spreadsheet-shaped: the same grid, the same keyboard-first editing — navigate, copy, paste, fill — plus what Excel can’t give you: working-time guardrails that flag rest and break risks as you type, one-click “Fill days off”, publishing to a live link staff open on any phone with no account, and on the Pro plan, plain-English shift entry.
Bring your existing rota with you
On the Pro plan you don’t retype anything: Darouta parses Excel workbooks (.xlsx, .xls, .xlsm, .xlsb), CSV, ODS, and Apple Numbers files, and extracts schedule data from PDFs and images. Everything parsed lands in a staging area where you review it against a preview of the original file before it merges — so the switch is an afternoon, not a project. Or start on the free plan and type your first week in the playground first.